Friday, 31 August 2012

I COULDN'T FIND "American-style curly fries" last time I looked in Iceland ~ no I'm not a jetset food tourist: Iceland is the about the cheapest food shop in Britain. Especially if like me you have really chavvy taste. So instead of curly I went crisscross ~ and they are deliciously vulgar. I can really imagine eating them on the 18th floor of a towerblock in the flat next to a crackhouse. The type of block where the lifts stink of skunk and the only gold in sight (that isn't round the drugdealer's neck) is on packets of Benson and Hedges cigarettes. It's not all bad living in the sky. You do get really amazing TV reception up there.

(I don't smoke Benson and Hedges: they're too expensive for me. I smoke Berkley or Sterling Superkings, broken into 3 and rolled into 3 separate mini-cigarettes, complete with Swan mini-filters. This way I can go an entire 24-hours on just "10" cigarettes (made into 30).

When I'm really broke, I pick up dog-ends from the bus stop, but you have to be careful when you find what looks like a really juicy discarded roll-up. Several times I've imbibed cannabis this way. Cannabis is the drug I loathe beyond all others. It's like paranoid schizophrenia and Alzheimer's rolled into a skin. Last time I smoked it (and that really was by accident) I was hearing voices within about 4 tokes. It's nasty nasty stuff. Psychosis without the manic, elevated mood.

Anyway what was I talking about. O yeah crisscross fries. I eat mine with battered cod chunks and chopped tomatoes doused in black pepper and vinegar.

Does anyone follow Real Housewives of New York City? Yesterday I finally caught up with enough to be able to follow the story. Isn't that LuAnn a bitch when she's angry? Very beautiful though. How old is she? Does she have great genes or a great plastic surgeon, or both? She was having a massive row with Alex over some inter-housewife hiccup on their marakesh trip. She's the kind of girl you have to go several rounds with in the verbal fighting before you get to shoot every point she makes down in flames.

I just found out she was born in 1965, so she's about 47..?? Anyway I feel sorry for people appearing in those docusoaps. What it's easy for the viewer to forget is that whenever you end up in a fight with another character, you're not just interested in winning the fight. Your entire social standing and reputation could depend on the outcome. So no stress then.

American TV producers have a weird grasp of the word "housewife". Here it means a stay-at-home wife and/or mother who spends her days doing minor chores between tea and biscuits and turgid TV of the kind I watch...

Anyway I can't wait till I get foreign telly piped in. I'm so fed up of the English crap it's unreal.

I haven't touched heroin in days. 15 or 16mg methadone, whatever the dose is, holds me perfectly. I make sure I drink it in the early afternoon ~ which means there's little to no risk of waking in the morning feeling sick and not wanting to face the walk to the chemists plus an hour-+ wait after drinking to feel OK again.

☯ ☢ ✔ ➝✚

Illustrated: crisscross fries; Benson & Hedges; Sterling Superkings used to cost about £2.96 for 10, now they're usually £3.15. I have never seen them on sale at £2.20 (far as I know they were only put on the market about a year ago); LuAnn de Lesseps ~ I have no idea what the subtitle means.

PS I just found out "to imbibe" means to drink in. I've never drunk cannabis (though there is a method of soaking grass into vodka) ~ what the hell; I like the sound of it so it's staying in...

VIDEOMANIC STREET PREACHERS: DESIGN FOR A LIFETHIS song is for you BEVERLYBABE and ANNA GRACE:~~ "We don't talk about love ~ we only want to get drunk..."Usually I'm not that into this guitar-type music, but this tune is a classic.

Thursday, 30 August 2012

I FEEL flat as a French pancake (they are very flat). And kind of depressed. What am I saying? I probably am depressed. I wake up every morning hating the day. Then Judge Judy comes on various channels. Then various shows about housewives that I don't actually watch; they just come on anyway. There's nothing at all on TV tonight so I'm definitely going for German TV. At least that way, I can waste hours on end and tell myself it's all an education as I'm picking up the language.

There's little else to say. I wrote this about 8pm last night. Only thing I'm looking forward to is popping my 2 pills that wipe me out. Nothing to stay awake for.

Ha! Except, I found this OK but totally BO-ridden crackhead's jacket in the trash. I know it belongs to a crackhead as an old Martel pipe came tinkling out of the same bin. Anyways, I've washed it once yet it STILL reeks. So I've tried to copy Bugerlugs' technique by soaking bath towels in half a bucket of water and three capfuls of blue fabric conditioner. Later I'm going to add more conditioner and more water and soak this jacket on top to see if I can get it fresh again. Then I'm going to wash the whole lot with at least three times the recommended dose of softner. And see what happens. I've turned the spin off on the washing machine to try and save electricity...

Wednesday, 29 August 2012

MY ELECTRIC METER has somehow gone from £3.95 Emergency to £3.65 Emergency... how is this possible? I thought Emergency went from £0.00 down to -£6.00. Aparently it starts at -£6.00 and trickles down to £0.00. Is this true? Or is the meter having a psychotic episode?

My freezer compartment had practically all melted in less than 12 hours which surprised me, considering how overfrozen that thing was. Eventually, with the help of a bread knife (too scared to use a tomato-chopping knife) I managed to rip whole chunks of ice out. This morning I came back to a kitchen floor like Lake Baikal. At 2,442 feet, (744.4 metres) Lake Baikal is the scariest (ie deepest) lake in the whole world. I would LOVE to go swimming there. Right at the deepest spot. Ideally I'd like to dive off a boat to swim in Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench ~ 35,814 feet deep (10,916 metres). When I was in India I once swam out to the fishing boats, which were tethered far enough off shore to stop tourists bothering them. The water must have been about 40 foot deep. When I changed positions from swimming to treading water my toes were cold. Which scared the living crap out of me.

HERE'S a really good clips montage about nuclear attack. The most horrifying thing I ever saw was a documentary on Hiroshima which went into great detail about what happened over the next hour on a minute-by-minute basis. Including a young mother trapped in the rubble listening to her little girl burning slowly to death. People crawling over each other desperate for water. And then the black, radioactive rain. And over the following days, radiation sickness. A man dying of a blood test because his blood would not coagulate and he just bled to death. Really really horrible.

This video just shows 'em getting vaporized by by fireball and (further out) blown to bits by the base surge and blast wave. I don't know why I'm posting this up. But anyway here goes:~~~

NUCLEAR ATTACK

THREADS (1984)
Nuclear attack on Sheffield. This was the BBC's alternative to The Day After. This clip shows more realistically the kind of precautions and action that would take place if a nuclear attack really were considered imminent.
I suspect if they really did think we were about to be nuked, they wouldn't say anything.
Safest place you can be in a nuclear attack is as far underground as possible. The bomb explodes thousands of feet up. A deep tube station will protect you. That's if you really WANT to survive. I wouldn't!

Tuesday, 28 August 2012

I WOKE UP in a real bad mood, seeing as I have "given up heroin for ever" (yes this is only setting me up for yet another fall, so stay tuned for much amusement when it happens)... anyway I have no intention of ever touching that noxious crap again.

All that bullshit they come out with at methadone clinics, that if you are going to use brown you should smoke it. I cannot feel anything at all from any method of ingestion except intravenous injection, and then I just feel a flush of life flowing into my veins (that's what it feels like anyhow, you may think of it as death, but I always felt it as kind and gentle and fluffy. And when I did take it again after several hours' enforced abstinence (as I'd been out on the streets begging up more B-money) and came back cold and drenched and knackered, it really did feel like life itself rushing back into my veins.

Anyway that's all in the past. So I was in a bad mood over that. And the fact that my drugs worker had gone and made me a 10am appointment. When such early appointments are made I'm always extremely glad to have them early and out of the way with. Then the day comes and I don't want to get out of bed. 300mg of quetiapine really doesn't help with this.

My worker was being all sarky telling me to wake up etc, when I felt completely brain dead and empty and just not with it. All this could easily, by the way, be a part of my "illness" as much as it ever was drug-induced, I've never actually needed drugs to feel gone-out and wuzzy (CFS makes you feel like that in a big way). You just have to look at a room full of schizophrenics (and just about everybody on a mental ward who isn't manic or depressed is schizophrenic) to see how gone-out the condition can make a person. As for feeling hyped up and excited, I don't need drugs for that either. When it happens naturally it's just called a "manic episode", or if milder, a hypomanic one. So I don't need drugs for any of this. All through the years I've been accused loads of times of being on drugs when I was totally off them. (I'm talking right back through the years before I was on heroin.) Partly this is because my friends seemed to make the annoying assumption that my depressed self was somehow the real me. So when I'm suddenly dazzlingly sparky, witty and more with it than they'll ever be I absolutely have to be on drugs. Actually THAT is the real me. I'd love to be able to say the realest me only manifests in full-on mania when it reaches mindblowing intensity. But if that's so I'm a very self-centred person who doesn't give a flying crap for anyone else's thoughts or feelings or anything they have to say. In fact when I really was manic my capacity for empathy nearly disappeared. When you feel multiple trillions of volts of energy flowing straight through your brain you do tend to get like that.

Well anyway so life is really boring now. No heroin for ever. It's not like I didn't make the decision before ~ and stick to it for weeks ~ but back then I had a consistently "elevated mood" (my psychiatrist's diagnosis) (in other words I was really manic for ages and ages, I felt so up I couldn't imagine being depressed ever again ~ ha! How wrong I was..! What I'm doing now, if you want to know the difference, is I'm making a commitment to stop heroin for good. If I don't do this, I'll never manage the full community methadone detox.

The only excitement of today is me defrosting my fridge with a gallon to a gallon-and-a-half of ice in it. It's the really oldfashioned type of fridge my nana used to have with a tiny ice-making compartment just about big enough for a tub of ice cream. Most of the meltwater went on the floor until I realized that if I took out the salad compartment it could drip directly down into that. So the floors shouldn't have collapsed with sogginess when I get back.

The guy diagonal from me in this internet caff is watching some really dirty porn set in an expensive-looking Mediterranean villa. I think if the owner came back suddenly he'd be disgusted to know where his antique silver candlesticks have just been! How come the swimming pools in these places are always a mandy shade of blue? When I get my own I'm having electric blue with laser lighting. Or bright yellow. Or maybe purple and yellow in the deep end, electric blue in the shallow end.

O well there's nowt more to write. O yeah except my electric meter seems to have something wrong with it. It went to emergency what feels like two days ago and already I'm on £3.95 debit! (The emergency limit is £6.) Meaning it's probably going to hit that limit about twelve hours before it's convenient to do so. I know I could stop watching Judge Judy but how barren would life be without Real Housewives of New York and Orange County and her? Only Real Housewives show I liked was New Jersey with that very damaged woman ~ the one at odds with those cliquey Italian sisters. I could never work out whether I liked her or loathed her or just felt sorry for her...

The satellite shop said they could put in German TV, dish, box, everything for £150. That's not bad. And you get at least 90 free channels. You can also get French and German TV from the same dish, if you get a multi-satellite feed (not a motorized dish: the dish stays in the same place but it has multiple dinkadonks on it receiving different satellite positions) so maybe I'll ask for that. If it's just £10 extra. Which I don't think it will be...

Well I gotta go now. Listen to this top tune. Lots of DONK-DONK-DONK...

IF YOU WANT 3 HOURS OF NONSTOP DONK, CLICKONTHIS:~~~
The first 4 mins is crap, so bear with it...BEVERLYBABE, this is for you. Keep it on and keep it going LOUD... The best traxx are at 17 mins 20 and 47 mins...

Illustrated: this is what my fridge looks like; German TV Guide; electric key-meter, like mine......

Monday, 27 August 2012

YEAH... today I came to this horrible realization: that I have to drop the Big H, the Killer B, heroin, skag, smack, brown number 3, whatever you want to call it. I wasted money I couldn't really afford on a dose just because I had a bellyache, which was almost certainly caused by quaffing down Lithuanian cherry cyder for breakfast... As ye sow, so shall ye reap, you see...

Ever since I hit up many weeks ago, and then found myself feeling hyped up hours later so that I couldn't sleep all night, heroin appears to be having a "paradoxical effect" it never used to have in that every now and then, several hours after taking a dose (if you look it up, heroin is supposed to work for about four hours, this takes place after that time has elapsed) it's helping make me or keep me hypomanic. This doesn't happen every time I take it: if I'm depressed before I use, I usually simply feel less depressed. But if hypomania is crouched around the corner, it seems to be bringing it out of hiding.

I just don't know what's going on any more. I'm on enough of a (mental) health kick to have completely given up caffeine (yet again).

The first time I gave up caffeine I had been suffering from depression, which had mostly faded leaving an ongoing sense of free-floating anxiety (ie anxiety related to nothing in particular). I also happened to be drinking at least five cups of strong tea per day. When I switched to decaffeinated tea, the anxiety quickly vanished.

A few months ago I drank four cups of tea in the space of a couple of hours, after which my mood felt noticably "elevated" (like I'd taken a little bit of speed). As the afternoon pinged past, the caffeine buzz became intertwined with depression, so that I just felt "weird". And then I became really paranoid and terrified that if this feeling didn't go, I'd end up in a mental unit. I really did feel very strange indeed ~ and caffeine seemed to have set off the whole episode. So I now don't drink any caffeine at all. Which makes respectable tea-drinking impossible (because I don't really like decaff tea). The only non-caffeinated, non-alcoholic beverage I can stomach in large amounts is Sainsbury's own lemonade. It's like the lemonade I drank in my childhood. No aspartame or acesulfame-K (unlike Morrisons'). No real lemon juice (which R Whites now add to theirs). Just old-fashioned 1970s style lemonade. Which my dentist would probably reprimand me over... but nobody's perfect. The only other drink I like is chicken and vegetable Cup-A-Soup with croutons (it has to have croutons).

I have never promised myself never ever to take another Valium, or sleeping pill, because I don't and never did abuse these. Taking one 10mg diazepam because you're on the verge of a panic attack is no more drug abuse than is taking aspirin for a headache. Whether or not my doctor prescribed it is neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. The Seroquel I'm on feels like Valium and sleeping pills anyhow. Usually, I get really good sleep on the stuff, which is one reason I don't want to switch to Olanzapine (Zyprexa) like my GP suggested last time I got a refill.

Well this post was written completely off the top of my head, so I hope it's reasonably OK. I have an appointment at the methadone clinic tomorrow and I think I'm going to have to say the unsayable: that me and heroin are finally going to part. It had to happen sooner or later, else there's no point reducing my methadone. The time is coming when using on top is going to completely saboutage my detox. I've given up heroin before. When Britain was in complete heroin drought in late 2010/early 2011 I didn't touch the stuff for weeks on end. Even though I was stupid enough to go back to it, at least I proved to myself that abstainance is possible.

And anyway ~ here's Madonna!

OPEN YOUR HEARTThe video seems totally irrelevant to the theme of this song, but hey...

Saturday, 25 August 2012

YESTERDAY I WROTE out a long post because I was in a funny mood but I don't think any of y'all want to read it anyhow. I was a "bit hyper". Wondering why people kept turning to gawp at me in Sainsbury's; I think it's becaus I was clicking my fingers and singing. Then the girl at customer services seemed to be flirting with me over my Nectar Card application. I'm in that supermarket several times per week, when I'm not in Morrisons and if I'd collected points every time I'd probably have enough credit by now to buy a Ferrari. I'm not sure their loyalty card scheme involves sports cars, but if it did, I'd have one.

I spoke to my family in the middle of the night but I kept changing the subject and mentioning irrelevant things. Of course I only realized this once they'd escaped my lips. This is a mild form of the phenomenon known as "flight of ideas". When it's mild you may realize you're doing it, even if you do only cotton on after the fact. When it's extreme your speech is all over the place and all I remember (from last year) is how frustrated I was not to be able to make even a simple point without losing it in a flurry of other ideas. The man in the nuthouse said I kept "derailing topic". Anyway I just felt paranoid that I sounded like I was high on drugs. I was high all right, but not on drugs. Then my quetiapine kicked in (so I was on a drug) but I just felt hyped up and dizzy all together and still didn't sleep till it was light outside. I woke in the late afternoon acheing all over and exhausted.

On a happy note, my dysfunctional toilet no longer reeks of open sewerage. I invested in more thick bleach so my bathroom smells like a swimming pool again.

There isn't much to blog today. Judge Judy is on and I'm running out of laundry liquid. I rotate flavours of all cleaning products, so next time I'm going for purple or blue, and I'm so excited about that. Well nothing else is exciting me. My mood has flattened out. From hyped up - high - paranoid and just plain moody to drizzly and misty. Just like the weather. And that reminds me to take the drenched pair of jeans off the line and rewash 'em.

Is it true Americans usually tumble-dry their clothes all the year round? Over here most peole use radiators in winter and washing lines all summer long. nearly everyone has some kind of line in their garden. I think it was Lime who pointed out this crucial cultural difference. Also I heard that when they go picnicking, most Americans would use paper cups and plates, whereas Europeans go for reusable plastic ~ or just take their normal cups and plates out with them. Oh ~ it's so much more glamorous over here. We drink real champagne from real "flutes" to a backdrop of ancient ruins and stately palaces.

Bloody hell it must be a boring day if I'm prattling on stuff like this. Maybe I should have posted up replicas of my long-dead little hammies instead.

I hope you all are having a REALLY EXCITING WEEKEND ooo!
And don't go too crazy over the laundry detergent...

☆

...purple? blue? I ended up with GREEN washing liquid ~ full of aloe vera (whatever that's for). I had an aloe vera cactus all throughout childhood and never knew what it was called...

Friday, 24 August 2012

THE BRITISH Government says we are supposed to eat five portions of fruit or veg per day, so I've been at the nectarines (four for £1). They are far nicer than peaches.

I've had a McDonald's double cheeseburger (£1.49 ~ that's $2.50 and I heard they cost just one Dollar Stateside!) and a curry since yesterday and still I'm full: it's really quite convenient.

I invested in a family-sized tub of "thick bleach" (without it the toilet smells like an open sewer; there must surely be a crack in the pipe... or something..?... and I got a special mop-squeezy-out bucket, as I was planning on doing my floors. Of course I have done nothing of the sort. And there have been builders next door all day, talking loud and doing my head in.

This is just a quick post before I am timed out. My head feels strange. I kept hearing voices in the air. It's freaky. I've been writing a long post about my past life but it won't be ready till tomorrow at the earliest.

Wednesday, 22 August 2012

I'M AMAZED that Her Majesty consented to appear for real ~ yes it really is her ~ in this James Bond clip that was part of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games.

You know it was an ambition of mine for years to actually go and see the Olympics in person. Especially gymnastics or diving.

But they bodged the ticket allocations so badly that most people who wanted to go never even got the chance. Because I don't even have a credit card I would never have been in the running. Which is quite ridiculous...

Cleopatra is playing [I scribbled this down last night]. A very good film but very longwinded at over four hours ~ cut down, the audio commentary informs me, from over six. How anybody endured this in the cinema is anyone's guess. But at least in those days you could have a fag on the whole time.

Elizabeth Taylor got the princely sum of a million dollars and Richard Burton a half million in this $42 million spectacular, which is still, in inflation-adjusted terms the most expensive film ever made.

The commentary says you need to multiply by four or five to get today's prices. But 1960s Sterling requires about fifteen times multiplication to be even halfway close.

Did you know when Elizabeth went through her final divorce, from construction worker Larry Fortensky in 1996, her total assets were valued at over $400 million, with over $200 million in the bank!

She made more money from perfume than all her movies combined. The multiple hundred millions stemmed from her marriages, art investments, her $100 million jewellery collection plus numerous business interests.

Cleopatra, by the way, had barely a drop of Egyptian blood in her veins ~ the woman was GREEK. She was fluent in seven languages and, as the film says, would, if she had been a man, have been considered an intellectual.

Talking about nuclear [yesterday] by the way (and I don't know what possessed me to put up and watch the attack section of The Day After) the site of the word's most recent nuclear reactor catastrophe in Japan, Fukushima 福島 means, irony of ironies, "Good Luck Island"~!

WAS I hypomanic yesterday? I could well have been. I notice the post I wrote swerved back and forth ~ especially into Chinese characters. It's true I was unusually chirpy, which is the most typical sign of the condition. Before flying into the foulest of bad moods when the computer repeatedly refused to function fast enough. (Extreme impatience is another hypomanic characteristic. The faster you go, the slower the rest of the world seems. Add this to irritability and you get hyper-impatience.)

I ended up staying up very late last night (not sleeping is a hallmark of the condition), until the medication zonked me in the early hours. Then I slept a good eight hours (sleeping six hours or less is more typical of hypomania). Only rising at 1:30pm ~ a most disrespectable time. And my body was acheing all over, another sign that I had been hyper. Plus I felt this diffuse sense of anxiety, which can also be associated with hypomania. All this is only "important" in that I like to have some sense of where I am going with my mood. It gives at least some feeling of control over the uncontrollable.

Last time I saw my GP for a quetiapine (Seroquel) refill, she suggested changing it to olanzapine (Zyprexa) but mentioned the new drug is notorious for weight gain. Which I really don't want. I associate gaining weight with running out of control, something I really don't like to do. I never got addicted to heroin in a quest for oblivion, as you might expect. No, paradoxically, the stuff made me feel far more in control than ever before and THAT among other things was its chief attraction to me.

So I'm most certainly NOT hypomanic any more... Who knows where we go from here...?

Tuesday, 21 August 2012

I AM VERY GRADUALLY cleaning my house to professional standard. I bleach the toilet bowl every day so it smells like a swimming pool down there. My sinks sparkle with a surreal gleam. I cleaned the shower cubicle inside and out and it's ~ mmmm! ~ so zesty lemon-fresh.

I have a new neighbour down the hall. I've yet to set eyes on him but already I have him pegged as a dodgy bastard as there are constant comings and goings till past 6am. Intuition tells me "crackhead" ~ just like the last inhabitant of that room, who had BO so bad the left-behind clothes thta filled the dustbins weren't just hummin' they were honkin' with human odour...

I just met a half-Chinese crackhead by the payphones, who hit me for money (as per always). If I'd have said, "isn't Chinese a poetic language as 天氣 (simplified: 天气; Japanese 天気) ("the weather") literally means "the mood of heaven" ~ he'd have gone: "DUHHH?!"

Well I've just come back from a meeting with my Support Worker Donny, who is way more professional than Deshane, the old one (who diagnosed me with OCD and had the cheek to tell my psychiatrist he thought I had "COD" ~ not realizing, presumably that those initials stand for "Cash On Delivery" ~~ ukk, ridiculous.

Donny photocopied some exceedingly verbiose sheets I had to fill in about my medical conditions. I was hypomanic when I wrote my descriptions, so they got it with both barrels, straight between the eyes.

Like just about every mental health/drug/support worker before him, he asked whether I was hypomanic when I am plainly NORMAL. What I said was "last time I took antidepressants they made me really hyper and high" and he tried to sneak the question past me by enquiring "are you on antidepressants now?"

If I ever did take antidepressants again without a bulletproof mood stabilizer I reckon I'd be on a one-way trip to the psyche unit in Cloud Cuckoo land.

I'm glad some people liked my last post on Bipolar Misconceptions because to me, writing about Bugerlugs and Anna Grace felt creepy and weird. But only, of course, after I'd invested two hours in penning the piece and hitting publish and walking away after the internet café had closed... Anyway, I have a "no embarrassment" policy with my blog, which is why nothing ever gets taken down, no matter how lurid or sad.

By the Way: CLICK HERE for Bugerlugs' Camping In Wales photographs... aren't they amazing..!

I never detailed most of the misconceptions re Bipolar in my swiftly-written thesis. They range from brain-dead sweeping statements like "if you don't have problems with sex and shopping you're not bipolar" ~ which doesn't take into account the 43% of patients who do NOT experience "signature hypersexuality" and that in extreme mania a person might just be too ill to go out, remember they're bound for the shops and generally get it together to go on a massive spending spree. The statement also takes for granted that all patients have access to credit cards, which might be true for the New York urban élite the "mild bipolar" article was written about (and to have enhanced powers of concentration during hypomania your condition must be very mild).

The most ridiculous statement I have ever read is that Bipolar 2 and Generalized Anxiety Disorder are indistinguishable. Considering that I had what was then known as "free-floating anxiety" with depression years before I ever showed definite signs of bipolarity, I have to disagree. Anxiety usually paralyses you with fear; mania animates you. Anxiety makes it hard to sleep but mania can make sleep impossible for days on end. Also most manic people feel "high" even if irritable or dysphoric at the same time. Depression with anxiety is probably the commonest condition in all psychiatry; bipolar disorder, despite its current trendiness, is relatively rare (affecting about one person in a hundred).

Well it's such a sweaty day, the mood of heaven is switching from sultry heat to random rain. The kind of rain you get when humidity is so high the saturated air just lets go... The world is buzzing loudly around me as we speak; I cannot believe it's Tuesday already. I picked up Pinky a pair of UK size eight trainers (that means sneakers in size 10.5 to you Americans) or deck shoes size 42 in continental Europe). They were discarded by a bin ~ presumably by the sort of chav who think's it's classy to wear everything boxfresh new and unblemished.

I'm about to go home and watch the Burton-Taylor epic Cleopatra on "Director's Commentary" (didn't even know there was a director's commentary until I chanced upon the fact on the side of the casing).

By the way, I'd often wondered how Richard Burton, on a "mere" half million dollars a movie ever managed to buy Elizabeth Taylor a 69.42 carat diamond costing over $1 million, plus the most spectacular Bulgari necklace - bracelet - earrings - ring emerald-and-diamond suite, which begged the question: ~ Unless he had no living expenses, never paid taxes and saved up for years, how on earth could he afford it all?

That's because the multimillionairess divorcée widow Elizabeth Taylor picked out and paid for the poshest pieces herself!

THE DAY AFTER: NUCLEAR ATTACKDon't know why I chose this but...This ABC made-for-TV movie was one of the highest-rated broadcasts of all time, attaracting 38.55 million viewers...I like the bit with the skeletons... there is just something about nuclear explosions... exhilarating and horrifying at the same time...

ELTON JOHN: SORRY SEEMS TO BE THE HARDEST WORDOfficial video
The tune came on Pick TV (the only channel Pinky seems ever to watch)... reminding me how much I love this tune...

Saturday, 18 August 2012

I KEEP having recurring dreams about me on the first day of university and instead of signing up for lectures, checking out the library, shopping for books, I am down town, armed with the name of a contact I don't really know, and I'm on a quest to score gear. The entire dream consists of the never-ending rigmarole you go through in a strange town to get drugs off someone you don't know. Sometimes, when the dream gets completely ridiculous, I end up in a succession of increasingly lilliputian shops until I'm eventually curling into a ball to fit into a wendy-house-sized haberdashers. The dream ends and I've wasted day one of a supposed new life without ever getting my hands on any gear.

I woke up feeling panicky with thoughts of death. I'm not clinically "depressed" (well I don't think so). I've just been in a strange mood for days.

After a week with exceedingly poor sleep and barely any appetite at all ~ when it took all afternoon to polish off a plate of pasta ~ and me getting repeated bursts of manic or hypomanic excitement, my sleep and appetite have come back with avengeance.

Bugerlugs has come back from a mystical break in North Wales to constant depression. Like me she gets a lot of mood "issues". She sounds like she's bipolar, or at least cyclothymic. (Cyclothymia entails constant shifts between hypomania (that is: mild mania ~ no psychosis) and depression that doesn't meet the full criteria for a "depressive episode". I'm not a doctor, but if a person feels truly dreadful for days on end, especially if their sleep and/or appetite is affected, it probably is clinical depression, in which case she might be bipolar, type 2.

The difference between bipolar depression and the "normal" type is that a bipolar person cannot just pop antidepressants, which can cause the mood to switch poles or to cycle rapidly. Antidepressants are only ever used for bipolar disorder in conjunction with a mood stabilizer.

The self-help books and sites dedicated to bipolar problems will often mention that the condition typically goes undiagnosed for an average decade or more ~ and then proceed to spout the very generalizations and misleading statements that have long helped such a situation thrive!

For example, many sufferers dislike the term "bipolar" ~ encouraging, as it does, the idea that the illness is somehow a fluctuation between extreme happiness and sadness.

Mania actually means "excitement". Although they do typically feel "high", manic people are usually agitated and irritable as well, especially as the mania gets more severe. Euphoria and depression often intermingle or alternate speedily so that a severely manic person might laugh, cry and rage within the space of a few minutes ~ like a bad drunk.

There is such a huge range of feelings and behaviours associated with (hypo)mania ~ from increased energy, enthusiasm and creativity at the mild end of the spectrum to frenzied overactivity with incoherent thought and speech and delusions and hallucinations at the other that it is hard to generalize at all.

In the textbook form of the illness, mania and depression may follow one another, lasting months each, but there are usually years of normal (or nearly normal) moods between episodes. An average sufferer has "only" eight episodes in a lifetime.

But bipolar conditions can take rapid cycling forms with periods of high, low or mixed moods lasting only days or hours or minutes. Rapid cycling is more common in women, and more common still in people with substance abuse issues. Many if not most of the bipolar bloggers out there are rapid cyclers. Presumably the more of the time you experience manic-depressive symptoms, the more intertwined the illness will be with your own identity. Hence the preponderance of rapid-cycling bipolar bloggers.

It's fashionable to label the condition a "brain disorder", as if as separate from one's Self as diabetes or heart disease. But in many respects a disorder of moods must be a disorder of Self. We are our moods, after all. Descartes could more accurately have phrased his dictum: "I feel therefore I am..."

Not everyone with manic-depressive illness seems to want to present themselves this way. Anna Grace, for instance, prefers to portray herself as an Addict ~ even at the cost of attracting Haters ~ and even though she sticks loyally to her methadone, not touching street drugs for months at a time. Her bipolar problems are compounded by ADHD and a Borderline Personality Disorder, which make her mood symptoms even more unstable.

Originally I had wanted to post something to dispel the misleading generalizations about mood disorder that seem to congregate online. I'm not sure I have managed this.

Really, I wanted to write about moodswings as they affected other people; I'm bored of talking about myself.

What more is there to say about the type of "mental illness" where just about everything you think, feel, say or do can be construed as a "symptom"?

(Probably so much more, if the truth be told, that if I continued writing without stopping, I could die of old age in forty years' time with half the subject still not covered!)

So I will close the Subject here...

★ ★★ ★★ ★★

It has been boiling hot here in London. The weather Picture-Perfect. I hope you're all having a GREAT WEEKEND...

Illustrated: Bugerlugs is a breeer of Roborovski Hamsters; Anna Grace in the Rubik's Cube of time...

Friday, 17 August 2012

THE SATELLITE shop down the road have just reconnected me for the cost of £40. The dish was already on my wall and the Freesat box plumbed into my television: what was missing was a few yards of coax lined up from A to B with "F-Connectors"

(and that's about all I know of the issue ~ I did invest in F-Connectors, pliers and a wrench some weeks ago, and I tried to line up a satellite signal where the cable guy had bodged it up, unscrewing two lines, adding a double connector where none existed previously (I think it was a double female lead ~ ooo Bev, that's like Lesbian Passion between you and Anna Grace!) ~ well, whatever. It never worked.

I have been in a funny mood since I don't remember when. But an Official Funny Mood since a doctor's appointment at an unearthly pre-9am hour Wednesday.

From days on end without sleep I have switched back to sleeping right round the clock, and thinking how to suicide without upsetting anyone. NB I did not just say I wanted to kill myself. All I said was I had tried to figure out how to do it without upsetting anyone. Two separate and entirely different issues.

I must have been at least slightly hypomanic when I last posted ~ all those Lucky Stars! ~ and didn't Madonna look as luscious as a newly plucked grape in that video. And my New Doctor looks luscious as a newly ripened Nectarine. Considering she's sacrificed her bet years to being a Medical Student she doesn't half look good. She kept alternating between my Christian and Surname. That's because I too look amazing for my age. Especially being a manic-depressive junkie and all.

I no longer feel like posting my every heartbeat to an ever fascinated world. I'm turning into Anna Grace in that respect. She goes days without troubling to post anything at all. Mostly because I used to think she was out mountain-biking, though she and her pdoc, (as Americans call a shrink (what is wrong with the simple term "psychiatrist"~? Why must you Americans complicate everything?))~ actually called it "cycling". In the United States, cycling means "having a bipolar episode". Well I don't know whether I'm cycling or not and/or if I am whizzing on my bike where on earth I am going!

Monday, 13 August 2012

I AM WRITING this quickly between the drug clinic and the supermarket. I'm off to buy pasta and Lloyd Grossman even though I haven't much appetite for either. I have been in a bad mood today. But then, of course, in the drug clinic I get babbling away and I'm in an "elevated mood" again. Yes every other day I was going hyper. Then I'd think I felt normal for a day. Though I was still abnormally excitable. Then hyper again.

Then up for 2.5-3 days (no sleep). My sleep has gone so terrible that even when I do get 5 or 6 hours, it feels like nothing and I only know I've slept because the time has vanished. Yesterday I eventually managed to slip off between at about 11am and I stayed mostly asleep till 11pm. And I managed to sleep from about 4am till 9am. So I thought I was doing really well. Until I got up and had been up for a few hours and realized I was feeling hyper again. I really like being hyper by the way. It's way better than feeling "normal", especially when that normal entails feeling run-down, peeved, stressed and exhausted. That is no type of "normal" and I shall never accept it as such. So I'd rather be in an overblown hyper elevated and irritable mood any day of the week. It's just the lack of sleep that starts getting to me. True I may well need less sleep in such a state, but there's insomnia there as well. Otherwise I wouldn't get so knackered out.

Well I still can't eat properly. Last night I ran down the chicken shop to get 2 "strip burgers" and 2 fries for £2. Even though I hate chicken shop and McDonald's style skinny fries I felt I had to eat them because I'd paid for them. So I stuffed half into my face and felt instantly nauseated. Then I managed one burger over the span of about 4 hours. Then, as I say I fell asleep after 4. And managed the second strip burger in the morning. I really wasn't in a good mood. And my methadone feels like it isn't holding me. So the duty druggieworker said I should take just a one week script for 18mg methadone and try to use nothing at all on top of it, because the way it's declining now, heroin is just going to mess it up. I only bought heroin this morning because I had money and a bad, bad mood. Being as I cannot even "use" coffee (or tea) nowadays because they are just too destabilizing, I suppose I cannot use heroin either. I gave up caffeine entirely about 15 years ago, by the way, because I thought it was doing me no good. And surprise surprise the free-floating anxiety I had nearly all the time VANISHED. Which has really put me off habitual tea-drinking ever since. (It was strong tea I was on, not even coffee.) Also there was at least one time when a few cups of coffee seemed to completely flip me out (though I was in psychotic mania at the time). And another when four cups of tea (over a good 2-3 hours) made me hyper and high, then weird and high and depressed at once and then pretty paranoid so that I felt like a mental hospital inmate. And I thought: no. And people wonder why I don't want to go near crack!

I've got another doctor's appointment this week and I'm going to have to ask for something for anxiety and sleep. Severe anxiety is one symptom I just cannot put up with. At least when you're depressed into catatonia a doctor will take that seriously. Anxiety is taken as a sign of weakness. Doctors NEVER take it seriously. I remember a patient at the mental hospital who had severe generalized anxiety (no depression). He was so obviously suffering; he was frozen in fear. Yet one other inmate in particular said he "wasn't a proper nutter" because he wasn't acting out (ie wasn't bipolar manic like the person who said this). And the staff gave him precisely NOTHING. Most certainly because he didn't make enough of a pain of himself.

Friday, 10 August 2012

THE WEATHER is weird. Freezing cold last night and yet sweaty. I finally slept yesterday morning but noly for four hours or so (6-10am). Then I went to bed after 6pm and got up at 11. I was up all ngiht feeling horrible. I tried to score but two dealers let me down. They claim to be on 24 hours and yet the night shift are fast asleep. My appetite was so bad I was nauseated by a plate of Lloyd Grossman on stuffed pasta. It took all day to finish. Then at 1am I bought a half-kilo (just over a pound) of humungous green grapes that were so lovely I polished off the lot in one go.

I felt so horrible last night. Sweaty. Skin crawling. Boiling hot then freezing cold. Exhausted and yet could not settle. Eventually I gave in and turned on the fan-heater (In August!) It felt good at first and then uncomfortable. I'd taken a Nytol ("one a night") and felt nothing. Thinking I was "clucking", I'd also boshed back an extra 10mg methadone. It barely seemed to make any difference.

After it had got light and two more Nytold later I did eventually drift off. I was up by 10:20. Trudged down the post office where a skinny drawn old man was the only one queueing.

Wow! It was my friend Dave, who owes me £130. We hadn't spoken for six months after I flipped my lid down the phone because he'd promised me £20 yet blown all his cash on crack. I'd stopped taking my old medication (risperidone) which had the side-effect of making me anxious bordering on panicky. So then I'd ended up angry, depressed and paranoid, sending increasingly irritated messages to Dave and his lovely wife Clara.

The first thing I did was to apologize profusely for being so rude. I kenw he wanted the money for crack and I'd been hassling him for it back when he'd just come out of hospital. Dave is pretty ill with HIV. Sometimes he's so sick he has to pull over the car ad just sit quietly at the roadside.

I told him I thought he'd died ~ and even if he was alive I was convinced I'd never see him again. I'm so happy he's alive. Clara was cool with me even though I'd been very agressive when we last conversed. She said not to worry, that's what happens between friends. I had lent him the £130 over several weeks and never expected to get it back in a hurry. She didn't look good either. Usually she's immaculately put together. But her hair looked almost scruffy and she's very pale and drawn too. They had to pull the car up round the corner to purchase £60 worth of crack (an "Arfur" (supposedly 0.875g) and a "20" (supposedly 0.4g but actually about 0.25g)).

He offered me a pipe but I told him the mere thought of smoking "white" makes me want to vomit. Crack is too intense. It's the opposite of heroin in nearly every way. No way could I indulge in it now. My mood has been "normal" for the past 24 hours, but already I feel myself going a bit "high" yet again. Also my mind is racing. I hear random ideas in the corners of my consciousness. I keep having weird kinds of waking dreams.

I had to fill out a silly form for the DWP (Social Security). If I hadn't been a little bit hypomanic I don't see that I'd have managed it. I kept ticking the wrong boxes and my answers got more and more babbly as the hypomania crept on. I'm so glad to have made my peace with Clara and Dave. I don't care about the money. I'm just so glad he's alive. They're calling me back later or tomorrow.

That mania of mine is ridiculously disruptive. Not having slept for two-and-a-half days has made me feel like we're in Wednesday still when the weekend's here already! Yes, Friday night has arrived!

I don't know where this was going so I'll cut it off now... Wishing a very cheery weekend to you all. Oh that's what I'd forgotten: my family sent me this amazing film called The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) starring Ingrid Bergman as a missionary in Northern China. It's one of the most amazing films I've ever seen.

PS did you know Bugerlugs has about 20 of more tiny trotting robos? She breeds 'em and even has one named after me. Unfortunately Gledwood turned out to be a girl. Bugerlugs found this out after she gave birth to a litter of "baked beans with paws" ~ as hammy "pups" appear!

★ ☆★ ☆★ ☆ ★

Be Fabulous!!

INN OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS, ORIGINAL TRAILER

BBC "WILD CHINA" ROBOROVSKIS IN INNER MONGOLIA! Apparently they spend all winter underground with the enormous stores of food they hoard. Apparently the local peasants have learned to dig up the nests of some species, which can contain a bushel of grain or more..!

Illustrated: tiny trotters in a ring ~ a gaggle of roborovski hamsters (notice the "white-faced" variation); a cute robo hiding in its nest; Bugerlugs' baby robbies Bubby and Wamp...

Thursday, 9 August 2012

I AM ABSOLUTELY exhausted. My legs are aching. I really need a shower but wouldn't have made it out. (Ran out of tobacco and need that more.) I feel like I have just come back from a 48-hour rave and am paying for it now. Despite not having slept at ALL the night before, I was still up at 5am last night. Still far too hyper to sleep. I took 2 Nytol. Then took a third 2 or 3 hours later. I realized afterwards that these were "one a night" strength (50mg diphenhydramine) and I never intended to take treble the recommended dose. (It's not dangerous by the way, it's just a sedating antihystamine. Quetiapine is antihistamine too (as well as being antipsychotic) but I'm trying not to take that.

I will not dare say I feel normal. And just for the record, although I don't feel really manic now, I don't feel as if the mania has gone away. I feel like you do when you've taken a load of speed and it's worn off, but you don't have the depressive type of come down. Just this weird, lingering hyper feeling mixed with a sense of having massively overdone it.

Yesterday morning I was yelling into the phone, pacing back and forth, while slapping my bare leg over and over. Eventually Pinxx said "what are you doing?" Then I went and posted what felt like complete confusion on my blog.

I really couldn't focus my mind at all. I hope I don't spend another two days awake. That is really inconvenient. I've made a point of stocking up on more Nytol. Not that it's that amazing, but it's better than nothing.

Nothing else to say. This isn't really a post for you, just a diary note for me. Right I'm off. I'm drenched in sweat. Gotta go in that shower.

PS wonder if I'll be able to eat a whole plate of food today. I bought chocolate at around 5am and ran into a crackhead prostitute who started telling me about being beaten up by a serial killer. Life is nothing if not colourful. Not sure it's the colour scheme I'd chose though...
Illustrated: Green and Blacks chocolate. Which I normally like. Really made me feel sick. Nytol: can't live without it...

Wednesday, 8 August 2012

I HAD A CRAZY morning. I noticed I felt a bit hyper and high yesterday afternoon and I went higher in the night and ended up copying out pages of Japanese characters. I couldn't sleep a wink. By the mid-morning my mind was pinging all over the place. If you want some entertainment, go see the post I put up around 11am. My mind was overwhelmed with ideas but I just could not compose myself to compose a coherent post and I was racing so fast I lost track long before fingers on keys could even attempt to keep up. All the while I was running lower and lower on time. Eventually I just had to click "Publish" before I got timed out.

By the way, the micro-pigs were relevant. For some reason I felt it necessary to say in Japanese, would you like to be a micro-pig, or a stream, or a dwarf?

I can't spent long here; I'm going to try and catch up on lost sleep, but I have the distinct impression my sleep has switched poles. Lately my sleep disturbance has grown very extreme. By my calculation I spent more than three quarters of the weekend unconscious. Not just duvet-diving to avoid the world (though I was doing that too) but hibernating in bed, sleeping deeply all through the day ~ and the night as well.

The doctors' surgery annoyed me this morning. I put in my repeat prescription request for my antipsychotics early because I seem to have lost a week's worth of pills. The form came back covered in highlighter pen saying it was far too early and alledging that I must have been bingeing on my own medication. This was signed by a doctor I have never seen and never want to see. When my friend Pinky also registered at this surgery, she was unlucky enough to see this Doctor Arse, as she is called (by me), who saw fit to question the value of prescribing her 750mg of Seroquel XR (which costs about £70 or $100 a pack) when dirt cheap alternatives like haloperidol with its loathesome side-effects cost pennies (and no wonder ~ that's all it's worth). Then she queried Pinky's fentanyl patch with the special dressing that stops it peeling off. Without fentanyl (an extremely powerful opioid analgesic) Pinky would be bedridden and in agony. She needs a knee replacement. Many days she can barely walk.

O man my attention span is still in bits; I forget where I was going with this.

Instead of buying heroin I've been buying CDs (I did buy a tiny bit of heroin but it did precious NOTHING). I got some pretty banging tunes by DJ Tiësto and a weird CD for £1 brand new that appears to be blank (no wonder it was cheap) I also bought Adele 21 thinking it must be good because so many people have bought it (it's outsold Michael Jackson's Thriller in the UK). How wrong I was. I hadn't realized Adele was behind that awful dirge "could have had it better" ~ if I'd known that I'd have gone nowhere near it. I gave it to Pinky and did a good salesman job saying I might detest it, but four million other people can't be wrong. By the way that woman has packed on so very many pounds she managed to go seven months pregnant without anybody realizing ~~ Adele that is, not Pinxx.

Today I bought Madonna's True Blue ~ a real 1986 blast from the past. Plus something called Everything Is Wrong by Moby.

Now what was I going to say?

Yeah I keep getting extreme mood swings. In the last seven days I've been hypomanic at least twice. Plus this morning I had full-on mania. Well it's better than being depressed. I cleaned my toilet with bleach, did the cooker top with shower cubicle spray (pound shop best) and cleaned my sink. My kitchenette is gleaming.

I'm giving the antipsychotics a break. There's nothing wrong with an Elevated Mood. Obviously I'm hoping for more Elevation. I did get fed up of people throwing me funny looks this morning. What a paradox: on no drugs I go highest of all.

Actually, come to think of it, that is completely crazy. How can they call a condition where you don't just feel Better Than Well, but Better Than Ever a psychotic mental disease? That's ridiculous.

Well I've got to go. Sainsbury's are selling Lloyd Grossman for £1 so I got Italianesque gunk called Puttanesca "I love this delicious combination of sun ripened tomatoes [what other kind of tomatoes is there?], black olives and anchovies," he drones. ~~I've got a plate of stuffed mushroom pasta fantasmagoria'd with the stuff. I lost my appetite last week. Which is all to the good. Quetiapine is notorious for turning nutters into great fat wobbling tubs of lard ~ I'm pretty sure I still weigh at least 185lbs (down from 200). I might ~ shock of shocks ~ actually lose a few lbs instead of packing on more pork.

I must dash. Lloyd Grossman's literally calling my name. Ukk ~ OK, not literally; I forgot for a moment there that I'm a schizo. If I did hear voices today they wre so mixed up in the background of bizarreness, it was mere more disquiet drizzled over mass-peculiarity.

These are two of Moby's best tracks. Very good.

PS I actually took a proper shower this morning. Instead of a glorified stripwash. Wow, I must have been feelin' good ☺.

Before you ping away, do go and be entertained by the manic crap I avalanched this morning. BTW in Japanese I was asking, what would you rather be, a little river, a little pig or a little person.

I HAD SO many things wizzing about my mind on the way down here I cannot remember for the life of me I'm pie in the sky today no sleep a lovely elevated mood. It's a real Dairy Lee Challenge.

I'm going up the road to collect my debts and be sociable with Paddy McDaddy from Ireland. I keep thinking of things and had to write a list of what to do because it's gone like snowflakes in a blizzard. Catch a handful of water; catch my thoughts. I had a tiny glass of cyder earlier on and WHAM! That Coke Pixxie got me again. I am NOT TAKING COCAINE, I GET FREE COCAINE ON THE MEMBRANE, ON THE BRAIN IT'S CALLED SCHIZOMANIA OR BIPOLAR MANIA (my differential diagnosis being bipolar1) I cannot concentrate and I'm not spending all day coming up with some boring worthy crap I don't care if I sound mad I feel mad actually sane. I feel completely like THIS IS THE WAY I'M MEANT TO BE ALL THE TIME ~~ but I'm Too Much Of A Miserable Bastard to keep it up. I keep fantasizing about grabbing the Depressed Me by the Throat and Shooting that Miserable Bastard right Between The Eyes! Sorry I have to go down the doctors to get more quetiapine (Seroquel to you Americans) I'm so glad we have a free health service. If I go really mad I'm thinking of taking use of their mental nutthouse asylum facilities.

Yeah I've LOST a strip of quetiapine but I'm not taking it anyway now. I have been taking it every day but I gave it up last night because I felt too high too good and Bugerlugs and my family don't think I should or don't think I need to or it's bad for me ... did you know quetiapine has a "discontinuyation syndrome?" it's yet another ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCE trying NOT to get me high ie a Double Negative. So I don't know why I'm getting these pills. Trying to look Respectable, I spose, snows on the windows. Hose. Ha ha ha my head is rhyming timing what would you rather be a Kogawa 小川, a Kobuta 小豚 or a Kobito 小人. I''s very important. O man I got so lost entrapping that Japanese for y'all. I've written out a huge kanji test, that's a test of Chinese characters as used in Japanese o shit and I forogtot to bring the book out with me to read on the bus how typical. O man I've got to go my time is running really low and I cannot edit you're supposed to get the ideas in flight. WAHEY!!!

Monday, 6 August 2012

I AM TURNING into Rip Van Winkle for sure. Between Friday and Saturday I slept about 27 hours in the space of 33 hours (ie a lot of sleep). I woke up 2 or 3 times, for 3 hours at a time. Then thought "what's the point of being awake anyhow?" and went back to bed. I have no idea how I can possibly sleep so long. The only drugs I was on were the miniscule 19 or 20mg of methadone I'm on (which does nothing except stop me being "sick") and 300mg quetiapine (Seroquel) taken all in one go around 10-11pm every night. I don't take quetiapine in the day precisely because I usually do NOT want to sleep then.

Anyway after this 27 hour sleep marathon I promptly went to bed AGAIN and spent about three quarters of the remaining weekend fast asleep yet again!! Usually excessive sleep is tied to depression. But I started feeling manic when I was awake. Not really manic. Just a little bit hypomanic. My mind lit up like a Christmas tree, my body still knackered.

I decided to get up at nine o'clock on Monday in case I spend the rest of my LIFE in a coma. WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? I'm not complaining, by the way, just BEMUSED by it all.

Oh and by the way, hypomania is usually associated with markedly diminished "need for sleep" (not insomnia). I would beg to differ. I have spent days on end as a manic insomniac. Needing to sleep, yet by no means able to.

Emil Kraepelin explained it all in his worthy tome Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, when he said ALL the symptoms of the "disorder" cycle separately. Which means one's sleep might be drastically affected, while the mood stays relatively normal. Manic and depressive features are wont to intermingle (which throws the label "bipolar" on its head, implying as it does that the disorder is always marked by phases of absolute opposites). In actuality, the old term "manic-depressive psychosis" describes it far better.

And to the people who say "bipolar disorder is not crazy" ~ what kind of bipolar do you actually have? Severe mood swings are inherently crazy. It's true only 15% of type 1 manic-depressives are said to hallucinate, but about 65% of bipolar 1 sufferers become paranoid or delusional (typically with delusions of grandeur about having stacks of money, ruling the world, or having some special relationship with God). Being as God is the source of all energy and manic people tend to have excess energy by the cart-load, there is a grain of truth in this. Also mania has long been linked with creativity or even genuis.

During the hours that I was awake, I mused on the miserable fact that nearly everything I think or feel or do, in other words nearly everything in my life can be construed as a symptom. I no longer spend the day in a good mood; I'm "hypomanic" (and do have the symptoms of hypomania; I wouldn't just use the word irresponsibly). When I'm down it's called a "depressive episode". When my mind feels more awake I have "racing thoughts and/or "thought-insertion" (that is, the sensation that alien thoughts fly into the mind from outside ~ you can point to the direction they come from). There is no absolute frontier between "inserted thoughts" and "hearing voices" which counts as an auditory hallucination. When I was severely manic I also had visual hallucinations of great beauty and splendour. Incidentally, although the doctors seem fixated on whether I "hear voices" when I'm really mad what I've heard far more is really really weird noises and distorted sound-effects. Eg the cars passing down the street whoosh several times over through some psychotic echo-chamber. When I run down the stairs I see huge words coming out of the walls in capital letters, and the stairs exclaim "oink oink oink doink doink". I'm not mad now, by the way, just reminiscing.

And that's another thing. I get frequent flashbacks to manic psychosis. And yet I have never been friends with anyone who was actively bipolar. (Everyone I've known who was mad was schizophrenic, usually paranoid schizophrenic.) So I have nobody at all to talk to. Other people with other diagnoses envy the elated mood, but don't understand how horrendously intense a manic epside can get. When I was most out of it, I had daily out-of-body type experiences. My body felt like it was turning from matter into spirit, or at least pure energy. When the mania started to wear off, I had a distinct and weird feeling that my feet were back on the ground. I had been so out of it I became impervious to cold. I had the windows wide open in late January and only noticed the chill when my hands seized up at the computer. All these weird things. I feel a great need to make sense of them.

Maybe you can never make sense of nonsense. But what sounds nonsensical to you seemed extremely meaningful to me as it happened.

And that's just about all there is to say on the subject...

PS: if you're wondering why all the Madonna videos, it's because I post stuff up to listen to. If you happen to like it, that's just an added bonus.

Sunday, 5 August 2012

THEY SAY the old ones are always the best and I think it's true for this song.

Despite the duet between the late Michael Jackson and sister Janet, and Barbra Streisand's outstanding contribution ~ showing herself effortlessly superior to the younger generation + her peers, the less sugary production doesn't actually suit this song so well...

Blog journal of a manic-depressive junkie. Former heroin addict (labelled with schizoaffective bipolar disorder). Trying to get off methadone. This blog follows my struggle to break free from a humungous mess of a past and ascend into a brighter future...

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About Me

38 year-old guy, 6 blogs (the main one is gledwood vol 2 so go there for new postings: blogs are linked via my sidebars), I also have 3 video blogs. One mainly music vids, the other random "novelty" clips from Youtube/etc. The third is my Fabulous Celebrity Blog for fans of trash culture. Unfortunately addicted to drugs - yes it was my own fault but what can I do about it now? Addicted means trapped & can't stop. That's how addicted I am. But that's not ALL I blog about. Apart from drugs I love drink. Apart from drink I'm into little furry animals like Pingpong, my Chinese hamster, and my 3 roborovski hamsters: Itchy, Bashful and Spherical... and ... er, food. Lately there has been a drought of the substance that enslaved me for so long. Will I clean up? Only time will tell...